Introducing @Preacher_Bot: An Experiment in Evangelical Speechmaking

Chris Cantwell

TODAY CAN BE THE SERMON.

— Preacher_Bot (@Preacher_Bot) September 7, 2015

It rained most of Labor Day in Kansas City, which meant my partner, my two kids, and myself spent most of the day indoors at home. It turned out ok. I read various children’s books, played various children’s games, and made, according to my three year old, the coolest pillow fort ever. But the best part about yesterday was an amazing stretch of about three hours where my two boys remarkably occupied their own time. It was time I had hoped for in order to finish my RiAH blog post for today, but instead I found myself in the mood to keep playing. So I ended up doing something I had been wanting to do for a while, build a Twitterbot.

For those of you who don’t know, a Twitterbot is a simple piece of computer programming that posts content to Twitter automatically. If you’re any kind of regular Twitter user, you’ve encountered twitterbots before. The most common are spambots that favorite, retweet, or reply to a tweet of yours so you see the product they’re pushing when you look at their profile. In the last several years, however, a growing number of artists and hacktivists have harnessed the power of twitterbots to make various cultural and political statements. On the one hand there are completely nonsensical bots like @TwoHeadlines that randomly smashes together the titles of two news articles to make often hilarious results. On the other hand there are a number quite serious bots like @CongressEdits, which sends out notifications when someone makes an anonymous edit to Wikipedia using an IP address from within the US Capitol. The bot includes a link to the edited Wikipedia entry in the tweet so the world can see what kind of scrubbing, altering, deleting or updating some congressional staffer was doing that they didn’t want known. In between these poles are a variety of poignant or playful twitterbots that algorithmically comment upon our times. Readers of this blog might appreciate the @Every3Minutes bot that sends out links to books on slavery every 3.6 minutes, which was the average interval between slave sales in the antebellum South. My most recent favorite, however, is the @TheHigherDead, a bot built by bot-extraordinaire Mark Sample that transforms the platitudes of university administrators into the ramblings of bureaucratic zombies out to eat faculty brains.

Ass. Dean says: fluid degree dynamicifies outcomes gateslingo compentencyyyyy buy my boooook

— The Higher Dead (@TheHigherDead) July 13, 2015

I first became interested in Twitterbots in part because, well, they’re awesome. But my interest continued to grow as I realized they might be able to help me poke at a problem. Many scholars argue that Protestant evangelicalism is, at its core, discursive. Less a theological disposition or social experience, evangelicalism and fundamentalism are, as Susan Friend Harding argues in The Book of Jerry Falwell, a language whose vocabulary emanate from leaders on high. This way of speaking is powerful, Harding argues, because it implicates even the lowliest speaker in the movement as they narrate their lives with idioms and words they did not create. This is, of course, on one level true. Evangelicalism is a construction born of myriad social and cultural discourses. But to reduce religion to a language that even you might start speaking if you’re not careful seems far too abstract and removed from the messy realities of people’s lives. Would this “born again language,” as Harding calls it, still have its power when it was spoken by someone who only copies, and not creates, the lexicon? Would the cacophony of evangelical leaders even make any sense en masse?

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